Continuing Conversations

Image just in from Lee – all the plates he’s done so far. I like the one on the far right particularly. (I’m also like this plan of me giving him an exposure, and then him does the rest. Could definately get used to this).

Feeling a bit pleased – just found out that I’ve gotten one of PVA Media Lab’s SALT residencies, running from the end of Feb – begining of March. I’m a bit chuffed about this, as it’ll mean making an audio work that I’ve been mulling around in my head for a bit, but with the distinct added advantage of technical support to help me realise it. This is an extract from the proposal I submitted:

“For this residency, I want to treat recorded audio as if it were a collage or palimpsest. What I like about these formats, is that although the top layer of paper or writing covers up what’s below, you’re always aware that there is something below, even though it may not be entirely clear what that something is. In terms of the document, Norman M Klein describes this quite nicely – he states that “the historian’s writing should include an open-ended diagram of what information cannot be found: the document that was tossed away; the cracks in the sidewalk where the roots of trees, now gone, lifted the street”. In relation to my practice, I’m interesting leaving a visual or audible reference of this residue, something that indicates that what’s on the surface, isn’t all that’s there.

I’m intending to make a number of recordings at different times of day and night from an exterior location in Bridport (a location chosen at the beginning of the residency). The kind of location I’ll be looking for will be quite noisy at times, and quiet at others, perhaps a side street in the town. I’ll then use the studio time to construct these recordings into a soundscape in which some sounds are clear and up-close, whereas others have a feeling of audio remnants, form further away. I want the work to feel a bit rough, a bit raw and home-made, so with the help of PVA I want to play with different recording devices, and ways of manipulating the recordings in post-productions to achieve this”. 

Actually, in terms of writing, this was a bit of a departure for me – normally proposals I submitt are really formal, but recently I was wondering if that was part of the problem, they’ve just been a bit dry. So I made a concerted effort to keep it lighter and chattier, to make it more how I would describe the idea if it were a conversation. Or like in this blog, thinking about it.

The image I’ve attached to this post is one of the latest test prints I’ve done with Lee. I’ve got one more plate to use, which I’m going to try attaching directly to the curtains on a really bright sunny morning, and see what happens.

Second site visit to the Oceana today. This is one of the locations that Rednile had a Factory Night event a while back, and I put in a proposal for a project to take place there as a result of that. It’s essentially a business park on a site which was previously a marine research facility from around 1945 – 1985. There’s a mixture of buildings, some renovated and let as offices, others which still have wallpaper from the 80s covering up some rather beautiful 50s architecture. All this is intertwined with the rise and decline of shipbuilding in the UK and the North East, which has some pertinence given the current economic situation.

My original proposal involved making a video from archival visual documentation of the site, and interweaving this with contemporary images of the site. I was also being rather hopeful in that somewhere there’d be some old audio footage which I could intersperse with new recordings. It was therefore very useful to go back again, not least because as a result I’ve got a much clearer idea of what archival material – or indeed lack of it – is available to use. At first I was thinking this might be a real problem, but it could actually be quite interesting – our understanding of the past is informed by what documentation we have access to, so by there being a considerable gap, the whole subjectivity of what’s left is brought into question.

This is one of about three projects that are in this slight limbo stage – preliminary research and fundraising before anything concrete can be said to be happening. The other thing that all these projects-in-limbo currently have is my desire to collaborate with other people on them. Again, this wasn’t in the original proposal, but certainly looking around the site today, there’s so much to use, so many possibilities, that I think working with another artist, discussing ideas and approaches to create a work would be a really exciting way of tackling it.

I’ve been finding writing this blog a struggle of late. It’s quite difficult to write about work in a chatty, conversational way, when it’s been a bit of a low patch, work-wise. However, I generally feel better if I’m active and doing something, so as far as this blog is concerned, I’m going to try something new. Namely, I’m going to try an experiment in writing little and often, pushing through the down times, rather than writing long essays when I’m on the upwards run of the rollercoaster. Starting now.

So, attached to this post are a couple images from a sunny day last week. (Yes, there was one. Promise). Lee’s given me some larger litho plates which I was therefore able to expose. I got a bit excited about these – the sun was bright, that when it reflected off a tin and a CD case, it seemed to make a sort of 3D impression on the wall. I’ve no idea how this will work on the plate, but that’s kind of what I like about this work – neither of us know how it’ll work out, and it’s all a bit of guess work. I want to work with some colour when it comes to making the actual prints, rather than keeping them monotone (as the tester prints from my previous post are) When the sun shines through the curtains in our bedroom, they glow this sort of Technicolor yellow, like the kind of saturated richness associated with early colour film. I want to get some of this richness and depth into these prints, continuing the filmic, camera references.

Let’s face it – writing proposals and applications isn’t interesting. And neither is writing about writing proposals and applications. And seeing as that’s primarily what I’ve been doing pretty much non-stop for the last months, you’ll be understanding the reasons for lack of blog updates.

Despite feeling as if I’m forever in front of a computer, I have started work with Lee Turner at Hole Editions on the litho edition. The pin-hole idea didn’t work at all – the plates are nowhere near as sensitive as photographic paper, and despite leaving a plate in a camera for a week in which there was plenty of bright sunshine, it seems that the sunlight has to fall directly onto the plate for it to affect the emulsion at all. So mark 2 involved taping a few plates up on the wall when there were lots of shadows being cast in the room and seeing what happened. I really wasn’t expecting much with this, so we were both pleasantly surprised when we got some quite interesting results. (See the images top images accompanying this post). I quite like the simplicity of these – there’s still a very much a Barthes-esq ‘having been there-ness’, along with a grainy feel to them – more photographic references perhaps.

The weather over the last few days has been accidently perfect, as I’d been waiting for it to snow. I was thinking of the snow in terms of erasure and absence, quite a weighty sadness to it. I went to a funeral at the end of last week – it snowed quite heavily on the journey to the crematorium behind the hearse, and with everyone dressed in black, the visuals felt quite Dickensian, appropriate for that type of occasion. The journey took us via the coast, but the sea wasn’t visible because of a slight rise in the land. From my perspective the snow was positioned directly next to the flat grey sky. Both were empty and blank – quite incredible. I went back a couple of days later to photograph this, I should get the transparencies back tomorrow.

I also realised that I’m being very precious about these photographs I’ve been taking, perhaps a bit too pristine. So I’ve been experimenting with my pinhole camera (a large biscuit tin + black spray paint, hurrah!), as the long exposures give a sort of echoey quality to the images. I’ve got a lot of transparencies from over the summer, which for one reason or other weren’t right for photographs or projections. I’ve put these on the floor back where the exposures were taken from, so that they get scuffed and scratched – physical marks from that space. A couple of images after a few days of this are attached to this post.